thomas hobbess- highway to peace

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Thomas Hobbes's "Highway to Peace" Author(s): Donald W. Hanson Source: International Organization, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Spring, 1984), pp. 329-354Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2706444Accessed: 24-03-2015 15:27 UTC

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Thomas Hobbes's "highway to peace" Donald W. Hanson

Among a good many students of politics, and especially those whose interests lie primarily in international politics, Thomas Hobbes has been remembered chiefly as the theorist of a natural condition of humankind afflicted by an insecurity so profound that it results in the logic, and all too often the fact, of a war of each against all and, therefore, of a ceaseless and self-interested quest for power that ends only in death. In this struggle the ideas of right and wrong, just and unjust, have no place. Certainly it is for these famous (or infamous) views that he is so often celebrated (or denounced) as the quintessential realist. Indeed, the only serious rival for that title is Thucydides, whose great history of the Peloponnesian war Hobbes translated and from which, without doubt, he learned a great deal.

At the level of domestic politics, Hobbes's analysis has found few admirers recently, since the argument is designed to show that citizens owe to the sovereign their entire and "inviolable" obedience.' His impact on thinking about interstate relations, however, has been both durable and substantial. Indeed, two recent commentators, Michael Walzer and Charles Beitz, have represented Hobbes's work as the paradigmatic case for the realist doctrines in international political theory that they wish to persuade us to reject, while a third, Stanley Hoffmann, has argued that Hobbes's version of realism is at any rate the most radical formulation of that view, one that requires

I wish to thank Stanley Hoffmann, Judith Shklar, Robert Keohane, the editors of International Organization, and the anonymous reviewers of this article for a good many helpful comments, criticisms, and suggestions. I have not responded to all of them, but I am nevertheless most grateful for them.

1. Leviathan, "Review and Conclusion," p. 511 (EW, 3: 713). The initial page references are to Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott (New York: Collier, 1962). Chapter references are given for Leviathan in order to make the use of other editions feasible. In some cases I also supply references to Sir William Molesworth's editions, The English Works of Thomas Hobbes (London: John Bohn, 1839-45), and Thomae Hobbes Malmesburiensis, Opera Philosophica quae Latine Scripsit (London: John Bohn, 1839-45): hereafter, EW and LW, followed by volume number and page.

International Organization 38, 2, Spring 1984 0020-8183/84/020329-25 $1.50 ? 1984 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the World Peace Foundation



330 International Organization

substantial modification rather than rejection tout court.2 Even Hedley Bull, who insists, with good reason, that it ought to be better recognized that Hobbes was a "true philosopher of peace," nevertheless concludes that Hobbes's theory does not offer any reason to hope for alteration in the essential logic of the state of war among nations.3

Walzer and Beitz principally object that Hobbes depicts the international state of war as the realm of necessity, a characterization that excludes not only the possibility of any amelioration in the logic of insecurity and competition but also the meaningfulness of moral judgment in international politics. Hobbes and realists generally, Walzer writes, "claim to have dis- covered an awful truth: what we conventionally call inhumanity is simply humanity under pressure." On Walzer's view, Hobbes found this conviction expressed in "Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War and then generalized its argument in his own Leviathan." In this "realm of necessity," moral discourse is mere cant.4 Hoffmann's view, though sharing in this assessment, is more complex, since his criticism of Hobbes is directed against both the empirical adequacy of the notion of unrelieved rivalry among states and the narrowness and rigidity of its normative dimension. "Not at all times are states in a situation of war of all against all; it is not true throughout history, it is not true in space at any one moment." Moreover, "the Hobbesian view predetermines the goal of political action by saying that it must be security and survival and nothing else, and by reducing all choices to tech- niques."' Beitz, too, offers reasons for denying the empirical adequacy of the model of interstate relations implied by Hobbes's account of the state of nature. That model, he maintains, must rely, incorrectly, on the suppo- sitions that states of approximately equal power are the only actors in international relations, and that in these relations the states are in a position to control their internal affairs independently but not in a position to anticipate "reciprocal compliance" with any "rules of cooperation."6

There is good textual support for these analyses, and, indeed, it seems to

2. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977), p. 4; Charles R. Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. vii, 8, 27-28, 32, 65; Stanley Hoffmann, Duties beyond Borders (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1981), pp. 11, 14.

3. Hedley Bull, "Hobbes and the International Anarchy," Social Research 48 (Winter 1981), pp. 725, 728, 729, 738.

4. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. 4. For a full-scale account of Thucydides exactly along Walzer's lines, see Peter R. Pouncey, The Necessities of War: A Study of Thucydides' Pessimism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), esp. pp. 139-50. Pouncey's appendix (pp. 151-57) discusses "the affinity between Thucydides and Hobbes," one that is undeniably there. Never- theless I distinguish Hobbes from his great predecessor, and not just because Hobbes generalized while Thucydides dwelt on particularities (although that is anything but unimportant). For an especially illuminating discussion, see Raymond Aron, "Thucydides and the Historical Narrative," in Politics and History: Selected Essays by Raymond Aron, trans. and ed. by Miriam Bernheim Conant (New York: Free Press, 1978), pp. 20-46.

5. Hoffmann, Duties beyond Borders, p. 14. 6. Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations, p. 36.



Hobbes's highway to peace 331

me that they are in some sense right-as far as they go. There is, however, more to the story than the logic of the state of nature, enough, indeed, that the usual view of Hobbes presents us with a diminished figure. To borrow a point Hobbes makes himself, it is the whole design that needs to be taken into account, and not just the "bare words" or "single texts."7 In particular, there are good reasons for saying that Hobbes posed the problem of war to himself in terms of an identifiable set of assumptions-and aspirations- that are not fully captured by the inclination to concentrate, sometimes exclusively, on the implications of the idea of the state of nature (as, for example, would seem to be the case in Kenneth Waltz's Man, the State, and War), or on the spare logical design that provides the scaffolding, but only the scaffolding, for Leviathan.8

This is not to claim that a wider frame will find Hobbes's work providing anything like a successful theory of international politics. On the contrary, Hobbes conceived of his task in such a way as to result, on the one hand, in a serious misunderstanding of the fundamental problems involved in achieving peace, and, on the other, in a very substantial underestimation of its difficulty. But the flaws that produce these results can be made understandable. Furthermore, the theoretical missteps lie at a deeper level of Hobbesian political theory and, I shall suggest, have had broader intellectual consequences than are accounted for on the usual view.

There is, in any case, a recognizable "Hobbesian tradition" in the study of international relations, whether it has been faithful to Hobbes or not, and it tends to conform to the characterizations just discussed.9 Yet in all this one finds a distressingly large amount of irony and paradox. First, the most obvious difficulty, of course, is that Hobbes has comparatively little to say, at least directly, about the competition of states. It is true that he expressly licenses the translation of his analysis of the state of war among individuals to the level of international rivalry. Yet precisely what his reader is to make of the analogy is, to put it mildly, not entirely clear. Thanks largely to the critical efforts of Montesquieu and Rousseau, Hobbes's analogy must now seem problematical at best, and, at worst, misleading.'0 Yet Hobbes's spon- sorship of this outlook is not simply inadvertence or shortsightedness on his part nor, for that matter, an inexplicable failure to notice the difference

7. Leviathan, chap. 43, p. 436 (EW 3: 602). 8. Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State, and War (New York: Columbia University Press,

1959), pp. 85, 165-66. Waltz does not undertake an analysis of Hobbes in the otherwise comprehensive development of his three images of the causes of war; indeed, the book contains no reference at all to Hobbes's text or even a bibliographical entry. Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations, p. 35, fn. 49, suggests that Hobbes's account conforms to Waltz's third image. Beitz says Waltz illustrates his third image by Spinoza and Rousseau. Actually, Waltz (pp. 161-62) employs Spinoza as an example of his first image, and by way of contrast with Kant (for the second image) and Rousseau.

9. Bull, "Hobbes and the International Anarchy," p. 717. 10. Especially helpful is Stanley Hoffmann, The State of War (New York: Praeger, 1965),

pp. 56-67.




between internal and external war. On the contrary, his analogy is essential to his understanding of his task.

Second, Hobbes conceived of his own achievement as a general, systematic, and logically rigorous civil or moral science. Yet the reading of Hobbes as the supreme realist of (at least) international political theory rests on a handful of his most striking phrases arbitrarily lifted out of a very carefully crafted and interdependent whole. To be sure, his own estimate of the logical rigor of his scheme can be questioned, but this does not justify inattention to elements of the argument other than the famous language of chapter thirteen of Leviathan. Hobbes, it must be admitted, is himself partly responsible, not only because he invites the analogy between his account of the individual state of war and interstate rivalry but also because it is exactly in his account of the state of nature as the state of war that he rose to the highest level of his very considerable literary power. Nevertheless, we mistreat him and, it may be, mislead ourselves by approaching his work in this remarkably se- lective way. For to the extent that interpretation rests chiefly on the well- known utterances of the thirteenth chapter of his masterpiece, his analysis is at least obscured and at most simply lost.

Third, just where his philosophy appears to have had one of its lasting effects-in a fundamental conception of the nature of the competition among states-his argument as a whole has been least fully considered. Detailed studies have been devoted to a sizable number of interesting and problematical features of Hobbes's work. Its relation to social and ideological context has been much debated;" there have been close examinations of his ideas on method, obligation, representation, religion, language, logic, and physics;'2

11. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 9-106; Keith Thomas, "The Social Origins of Hobbes's Political Thought," in Keith C. Brown, ed., Hobbes Studies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 185-236; Quentin Skinner, "The Ideological Context of Hobbes's Political Thought," Historical Journal 9, 3 (1966), pp. 286-317.

12. J. W. N. Watkins, Hobbes's System of Ideas (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968), concentrates on Hobbes's ideas on method; Howard Warrender, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: His Theory of Obligation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957); Ralph Ross, Herbert W. Schneider, and Theodore Waldman, eds., Thomas Hobbes in His Time (Minneapolis: University of Min- nesota Press, 1974), provides essays on diverse topics, as do Bernard H. Baumrin, ed., Hobbes's Leviathan: Interpretation and Criticsm (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1969), Maurice Cranston and Richard S. Peters, eds., Hobbes and Rousseau (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972), and Brown, Hobbes Studies. F. C. Hood, The Divine Politics of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), argues that Hobbes is to be interpreted as a traditional Christian moralist; Hanna Pitkin, "Hobbes's Concept of Representation," Part I, American Political Science Review 58 (June 1964), pp. 328-40, and Part II, ibid. (December 1964), pp. 902-18; M. M. Goldsmith, Hobbes's Science of Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), presents a very careful general account; David P. Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), systematically develops a distinction between the formal, general definitional aspects of Hobbes's moral and political theory and its substantive content; F. S. McNeilly, The Anatomy of Leviathan (New York: St Martin's, 1968), argues that there are important developmental asDects in Hobbes's Dolitical writings that are too often overlooked.




his intellectual debts have provoked some exploration; 13 and we have studies of the hostility he provoked in his own day and, fortunately, of contemporary enthusiasm for his work as well. '4 But sustained examination of his argument on the subject of war has not been plentiful.

Finally, and above all, it is too often and too easily forgotten that, by his own account, the overriding purpose of his political theory was to "show us the highway to peace."'" It is possible to take the view that he must mean peace only in domestic political life, but, while that judgment can certainly be defended, it may not be entirely adequate or fair. Hobbes concentrated his analytic and prescriptive effort on the problem of civil war, but this fact does not quite remove the possibility that his ultimate aims were wider than the quest for English domestic tranquillity or even a general resolution to the problem of civil war. At the very least, his language sometimes suggests complete generality in connection with the achievement of peace. Ultimately, Hobbes holds, it is the errors of moral philosophers that have bred sedition and war. If, however, we were to achieve a moral philosophy adequate to its immense practical importance, the author of that philosophy, he says, "surely ... will not only show us the highway to peace, but will also teach us how to avoid the close, dark, and dangerous by-paths of faction and sedition; than which I know not what can be thought more profitable." Of course, Hobbes thought he had done exactly that in the presentations of his own civil science.'6 And the language that frames that presentation, in De Cive at least, is altogether unqualified in connection with the subject of peace:

were the nature of human actions as distinctly known as the nature of quantity in geometrical figures, the strength of avarice and ambition, which is sustained by the erroneous opinions of the vulgar as touching the nature of right and wrong, would presently faint and languish; and mankind should enjoy such an immortal peace, that unless it were for

13. Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), esp. pp. 30-43, emphasizes Aristotelean elements; Thomas A. Spragens Jr., The Politics of Motion: The World of Thomas Hobbes (London: Croom Helm, 1973), explores Hobbes's debts to Aristotle in detail.

14. John Bowle, Hobbes and His Critics: A Study of Seventeenth Century Constitutionalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952); Samuel I. Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth-Century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (London: Cambridge University Press, 1962). On enthusiasm see Skinner, "Ideological Context of Hobbes."

15. The principal exception is Bull, "Hobbes and the International Anarchy." The phrase is from De Cive, "The Author's Preface," p. 98 (EW, 2: xiv). Initial page references are to Hobbes's own English version, as printed in Man and Citizen, ed. by Bernard Gert (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1972).

16. The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, ed. by Ferdinand Tonnies, 2d ed. (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1969), "The Epistle Dedicatory." All references to this work will be to this edition, and will be given as Elements. See also De Cive, pp. 93, 275 (E W, 2: vii, 186); Leviathan, chap. 30, p. 248 (EW, 3: 325); chap. 31, p. 270 (EW, 3: 357-58); "Review," pp. 509-10 (EW, 3: 710-711); EW, 1: ix and 7: 471.




habitation, on supposition that the earth should grow too narrow for her inhabitants, there would hardly be left any pretence for war.'7

It was precisely such mathematical exactitude that Hobbes considered himself to have attained. Needless to say, this language, although it is surely very striking, is far from conclusive, especially since Hobbes so often either brackets the problem of external violence, while discussing an everlasting domestic peace, or reiterates his well-known general view that sovereign entities are in the state of nature, which is the state of war. Nevertheless, the vision expressed in this passage is intriguing enough to invite a reconsideration of Hobbes's view on the problem of war.

The logic of virtually complete obedience to constituted authority is, at least formally, as close to a guarantee of domestic peace as human affairs can afford. But there is a great deal more to Hobbes's argument than this formal solution. Indeed, while this point is undoubtedly what he most wishes us to see, it is only an elliptical or summary expression of the overall result of his analysis, not a substitute for it.'8 The sort of polity that emerges from all of Hobbes's political works is in his own view-and he is surely right- something new in the political universe. And the label "absolutism" rather poorly expresses this novelty. This is not to say that the label is inaccurate, but that it is inadequate, that it does not begin to do justice to Hobbes's aim or to his achievement.

If the Hobbesian state is in certain respects novel, and if that novelty is not adequately conveyed by its formal attributes-inviolable obedience and Hobbes's conception of sovereignty-is it possible that the nature of that state has some bearing on the prospects for peace in international relations? In response there would appear to be several alternatives: one, that Hobbes accepted the condition of perpetual war among states precisely because the very achievement of Leviathan, an assured peace at home, would remove the motive of fear that creates the commonwealth; but, by inference, two, that if conditions were to become sufficiently grim, a global Leviathan might reasonably be expected to result; or three, that states designed in the manner of Leviathan might themselves be, at the least, consistent with the general peace of mankind and, at the most, provide some hope of securing it. There is textual support for the first alternative, and the second would seem a reasonable enough extension of some of Hobbes's ideas. However, neither affords much consideration to some of the most distinctive features of his general argument or to the specific ways in which he undertakes to amend the prevailing conception of the polity inherited from Greco-Roman antiquity. It may, then, be fruitful to adopt the third alternative as a kind of interrogative hypothesis, bearing in mind the observation of Michael Oakeshott that "every interpretation of Hobbes's moral theory leaves something that Hobbes wrote

17. De Cive, p. 91 (EW, 2: iv). 18. On his wishes see Leviathan, "Review," p. 511 (EW, 3: 713).




imperfectly accounted for."'9 This interrogative hypothesis yields a richer, more complex, and perhaps even a more instructive reading of Hobbes's views on war and on interstate rivalry in general. Even so, however, his treatment more nearly represents an evasion of the problem of war than it does a solution.

1. The classical legacy

Hobbes not only chose to concentrate on the conditions of domestic peace, he was quite literally obsessed with sedition, faction, and civil war. An obvious initial question, therefore, is why he chose to proceed in what appears to be so remarkably single-minded a way. There is an equally obvious answer, too, which Hobbes himself supplies: impending civil war in his own country.20 Given the contentiousness of English politics even well before the outbreak of civil war, this is understandable. However, the immediate circumstances of English politics provide only for the occasion and emphasis of his analysis; they do not help much in accounting for either its substance or its originality. Such originality is always utterly individual, and yet simultaneously it is in part the result of an ingenious weaving together of threads of thought that were deeply opposed in origin and by tradition. Much of what Hobbes has to say, nearly always without express acknowledgment, is quite carefully and selectively drawn chiefly from those same authors of classical antiquity whom he never tired of criticizing: Thucydides, Plato, the Sophists, Aristotle, and Epicurus, to mention only some of the clearest connections in relation to the present subject.

On the interrogative hypothesis I have suggested, Hobbes's concentration on civil war is, in one sense, made rather more puzzling. For if, in fact, he supposed that his prescriptions would have some bearing on the problem of interstate war, it would seem that he should have said a great deal more about the dynamics of international rivalry than he does. It is a familiar observation, of course, that the sort of systematic reflection on politics initiated by the Greeks has always been overwhelmingly directed to the concerns of domestic politics. And yet that very focus was from the beginning a response, in large part, to external violence as well as to internal strife. As Sir Moses Finley has observed, "the dividing line between politics and sedition (stasis the Greeks called it) was a thin one in classical Greece, and often enough stasis grew into ruthless civil war." It was internal violence that seemed both most frequent and most bitter, though it was forever "complicated by external affairs, by war and imperial ambitions."2'

19. Michael Oakeshott, "The Moral Life in the Writings of Thomas Hobbes," in Rationalism in Politics (New York: Basic Books, 1962), p. 283.

20. De Cive, p. 103 (EW, 2: xx); Leviathan, "Review," p. 511 (EW, 3: 713); EW, 4: 414-15 and 7: 335, 344.

21. M. I. Finley, The Ancient Greeks (New York: Viking, 1964), pp. 42, 43.




On this subject, obviously, Thucydides' painstaking account of the inter- dependence and mutual escalation of internal and external war supplied a treasure house of material, but it was not helpful as a matter of theoretical grasp to the same degree, since his inclination to settle ultimately for general reference to human nature overexplains, as it were: it lacks the power of differentiation. This does not necessarily, much less automatically, make him wrong. But it does frustrate a quite different intellectual impulse: to find more specific and, more importantly, remediable explanations. Thus, the material provided by Thucydides could easily be construed, on the one hand, as having shown as a matter of substance that civil struggle was the most likely, bitter, and dangerous form of armed violence, but on the other hand, as having posed, rather than resolved, the theoretical problems of causation and of the relation between civil and external war. This double aspect of Thucydides' history is very clearly marked. No doubt each reader of The Peloponnesian War has a particular candidate for the role of most absorbing or most revealing episode. But there can be little doubt that it is in the account of the civil war in Corcyra that Thucydides employs the language of extremity most strikingly. "There was death," he says, "in every shape and form. And, as usually happens in such situations, people went to every extreme and beyond it." As civil war developed "in city after city," he continues, "knowledge of what had happened previously ... caused still new extravagances of revolutionary zeal, expressed by an elaboration in the meth- ods of seizing power and by unheard-of atrocities in revenge." Ever the moralist, Thucydides concludes that "as a result of these revolutions, there was a general deterioration of character throughout the Greek world." In all this chaotic collapse of civilized standards, he holds, "human nature ... showed itself proudly in its true colours, as something incapable of controlling passion...."22 Later on, he has the Syracusan leader, Hermocrates, express the substantive theoretical point that is of primary interest here. "We should realize that internal strife is the main reason for the decline of cities." And again, in the eighth book, as the denouement of a generation of war becomes clear, Thucydides remarks, in his own person, that it is internal struggle above all that the Athenians needed to avoid.23

In this connection, it is worth recalling that the exposition of the best attainable form of the polis in Plato's Laws is explicitly framed in terms of the problem of war. In response to an initiating question by the Athenian Stranger, concerning the military practices embodied in the much admired constitution of Crete, Clinias says that their lawgiver meant thereby "to reprove the folly of mankind, who refuse to understand that they are all engaged in a continuous lifelong warfare against all cities whatsoever.... In fact, the peace of which most men talk-so he held-is no more than a

22. The Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner (New York: Penguin Books, 1972), 3: 81-84. 23. Ibid., 4: 61 and 8: 48.




name; in real fact, the normal attitude of a city to all other cities is one of undeclared warfare." Clinias' comments culminate in the general observation that "humanity is in a condition of public war of every man against every man, and private war of each man with himself."24 Without much exag- geration, one might say that the first clause in this statement found its supreme modem analyst in Hobbes, the latter in Rousseau.2' At all events, the Athenian Stranger refines Clinias' point. There are, he says, two forms of war. "There is what all mankind call faction, and it is, of course, the most dangerous kind of war.... [T]he other, and much milder form, as I imagine we shall all agree, is that waged when we are at variance with external aliens." Ul- timately, Plato finds the solution to the dual problem of war in the rightly ordered and isolated polis. The good city, in sum, lives a life free of both internal and external war.26

In the Politics, Aristotle takes this framework for granted but advances objections to Plato's reliance on isolation, which he clearly regards as insufficiently realistic since it neglects the needs of trade and the exigencies of foreign policy.27 Nevertheless, insofar as there is a solution to the problem, it is to be found in proper internal organization. But Aristotle does shift the grounds of discussion in a number of important ways. Neither Plato nor Aristotle is inclined to accept Thucydides' generalizations about the ultimate sources of war in human nature-showing "itself proudly in its true colours, as something incapable of controlling passion... ." Quite the contrary, in both Plato and Aristotle, psychology rests on a differentiation of human types, and in some of these reason is capable of controlling the passions. Plato contended, of course, that the properly ordered polis must rest on uniformity of belief; in other words, on the abolition of all the diversity that is referred to by the word "politics." And it was just that insistence upon uniformity which Aristotle so resolutely (and famously) rejected. Such uniformity, he rightly insisted, amounts to the annihilation of the polis, of anything that is recognizably political.28 Aristotle's understanding of the fundamental nature of civil strife is utterly unlike Thucydides' inclination to resign himself to the worst manifestations of human nature, or Plato's abiding impulse to abolish politics. Rather, he found the source of civil struggle in the idea of the polis, as such. For the very idea of a shared way of life-a constitution (politeia) in the Greek sense-must breed the desire for equality. And it is this "passion for equality which is thus at the root of sedition. "29

24. Laws, trans. A. E. Taylor, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Bollingen Foundation/Pantheon Books, 1964), 625e-626a and 626d.

25. This is not to suggest that Rousseau did not have a great deal to say about the former but only that his central concern was with internal reconciliation, as brought out so well in Judith N. Shklar, Men and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).

26. Laws, 629d (see also 744d, 856b-c), and 829a. 27. Politics, II: 1265a, 1267a; IV: 1291a; VII: 1327a-b. 28. Ibid., II: 1261a-b. 29. Ibid., V: 1301b.




The great difficulty, of course, was that democratic and oligarchical parties embraced contradictory conceptions of equality, and so Aristotle's task, as he understood it, was to produce a constitution in which both could coexist without generating a sense on either side that the arrangement was unjust. He thought he had found such a balance in the form he chose to call a polity.30

The experience of Rome, as recounted by her greatest historians and mor- alists, could only reinforce the Greek intellectual legacy in this as in so many other ways. St. Augustine is, after all, very much on the mark when he concludes from a long recital of Roman internal disasters that "these bloody civil wars [were] more distressing, by the avowal of their own historians, than any foreign wars.... What fury of foreign nations," he asks, "what barbarian ferocity, can compare with this victory of citizens over citizens?" Elsewhere, he concludes that the earthly city can never be free from the fear of insurrection and civil wars.3' In fact, these judgments of Augustine's are easily confirmed in the Roman sources to which he expressly appealed, and such evidence can be multiplied almost endlessly. Let Cicero's assessment stand for a great many others: he tells his son that "discord and partisan violence" are "the gravest of all the dangers that can threaten a republic.... "32

This classical legacy works as a general intellectual backdrop to Hobbes's own way of addressing the dual problem of war. It is not so much that only the problems of domestic political struggle are under consideration or that only they are susceptible of treatment, but that certain presumptions run concerning the ultimate causes of war and, therefore, about its essential nature. It is simply assumed that the ultimate causes of war are to be found in the character or dispositions of individuals rather than in durable differences in the interests and aims of states. And it is taken for granted that the original and natural arena for the display of the worst forms of character is in excessive ambitions in domestic politics, with the consequent risk of sedition, faction, and civil war. Internal strife represents not simply the bitterest, most likely, and most dangerous but the essential form of war. The danger of such civil struggle presents itself in a triple aspect: domestic ambitions are apt to be expressed in imperialist ventures, or a weakened polity may find itself exposed to foreign intervention either because it is invited by the parties to domestic rivalry or because it presents an irresistible temptation to the expansionist aims of outsiders.

30. Ibid., 1293b-1298a. 31. The City of God, trans. by Marcus Dods (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 3: 30, 3:29,

and 19: 5. 32. Abundant evidence is presented in F. R. Cowell, The Revolutions of Ancient Rome

(London: Thames & Hudson, 1962), and Lidia Storoni Mazzolani, Empire without End (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976); Cicero, De Officiis, 1: xxv, 85 (see also De Legibus, 3: xviii).




2. The turn to psychology

Even granting all this, however, it is tempting to suppose that Hobbes's treatment of war amounts essentially to a generalization of the views he found expressed in Thucydides. But the temptation should be resisted, for, while the resemblances are surely marked and undeniably important, they are at best only partial. Hobbes's reliance on Thucydides for the three principal causes of "quarrels" - mistrust, competition for gain, and the pursuit of glory-is perfectly clear.33 More importantly, Hobbes shares with Thucydides a generalized account at the level of psychology, as against the psychologies of differences embraced by both Plato and Aristotle. These resemblances are without doubt striking. But the differences are at least equally great. Hobbes's psychology differs from that of Thucydides in two profoundly important ways: it is perfectly abstract, rather than an affair of specific traits, and the human mind or character, on Hobbes's account, is indefinitely malleable.

The linchpin of Hobbes's political theory surely lies in its psychology, in his account of human nature. Indeed, the entire scheme rests on a prodigious leap of the speculative imagination, one that has had an immense impact on post-Hobbesian political thought. For Hobbes assumes-indeed his system presupposes-that beneath all the seemingly intractable differences manifested in endless contention, sedition, and war there lies a common human nature.34 All is doubt and controversy, contention and war, and yet all this is quite needless provided that we come to see matters aright.35 As Judith Shklar has pointed out, this spectacular leap is one of those truly grand intellectual "myths" whose function is to supply us with a means of dealing with the most obvious but deeply unwelcome facts of human experience.36 I am not, of course, suggesting that Hobbes's view is utterly novel or without substantial precedent. Something of the sort was clearly in the air, forming one line of response to an atmosphere of shattered authorities, doubt, and protracted war.37 Machiavelli had held long before that there are constant elements in

33. Leviathan, chap. 13, p. 99 (EW, 3: 112). Cf. Peloponnesian War, 1: 75. Hobbes's own translation of this passage may be found in EW, 8: 81, where the Athenians say that their empire was expanded "chiefly for fear, next for honour, and lastly for profit."

34. Elements, pp. 1, 75; Leviathan, "Author's Introduction," p. 20 (EW, 3: xi-xii); EW, 1, "The Author's Epistle," and pp. 1, 72; EW, 4: 275-76; Behemoth or The Long Parliament, ed. Ferdinand Tonnies (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1889), p. 29. All references to this last work will be to this edition, and will be given as Behemoth.

35. Elements, "Epistle Dedicatory," and pp. 1-2; De Cive, pp. 91-93, 95-98, 103-4 (EW, 2: iv-vii, x-xiv, xxi); Leviathan, chap. 29, pp. 237-38 (EW, 3: 308-9); chap. 30, pp. 247-49 (EW, 3: 322-26); chap. 31, p. 270 (EW, 3: 357-58); "Review," pp. 503, 510-11 (EW, 3: 702, 713); EW, 4: 232-33.

36. Judith N. Shklar, "Facing Up to Intellectual Pluralism," in David Spitz, ed., Political Theory and Social Change (New York: Atherton Press, 1967), pp. 280-84.

37. A fine account of exploded authorities is given in Paul Hazard, The European Mind (New York: Meridian, 1963), Part 1.




human nature and conduct which are unaffected by alteration of time and place.38 But however shrewd one might find some of Machiavelli's observations on the generally lamentable inclinations of our kind, his views are neither generalized nor systematic. More importantly, his work does not rest on a psychological foundation, much less shift the very basis of inquiry in that direction. To the contrary, he supposed that the principal task was to extract lessons in political success from the exemplary achievements of re- publican Rome.39 Again, Montaigne, that prince of skeptics in an age much given to skepticism, appears to have concluded, as Donald Frame has pointed out, that despite bewildering diversity there are common human traits after all.40 But Montaigne's style is something like the opposite of systematic. Much more to the point, Descartes had relied on the idea of a common human capability to know. At this epistemological level, at least, our natural endowments are similar enough to invite the expectation of an unlimited, if gradual, accumulation of indubitable scientific knowledge.4' But while Des- cartes took a perfectly general view, he did not undertake to apply it to the problems of moral philosophy. His idea amounts to a bold and ingeniously defended epistemological act of faith, but not to a general psychology.

It is in Hobbes that we find the assumption of a common, underlying human nature at work in politics everywhere and always, and with it he is able to accomplish the crucial double task that is central to his purpose of showing us the highway to peace. Formally, Hobbes's psychology is completely abstract. Human nature per se is a compound product of bodily constitution, sense experience, reason, and the passions.42 He uses the idea of individual variations in our bodily constitutions and in our experience to help to account for the variety in the objects of our desires and aversions; but he uses neither source of individuation in any pointed or specific way.43 Instead, virtually all his attention is concentrated on reason and the passions, and here the theoretical account is given entirely in terms of general capacities, and not at all in terms of particular traits, whether virtues or vices. To be sure, Hobbes embraces the commonplace that people seek their self-preservation above all. But, as in the case of most of his substantive observations about

38. Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy, ed. by Bernard Crick (New York: Penguin, 1974), 1, Preface, chaps. 3, 9, 11, 39; 2, Preface; 3, chaps. 9, 31, 43.

39. Ibid., 1, Preface, chaps. 1, 6, 10, 30; 2, Preface, chaps. 2, 4, 6, 16, 17, 23, 30; 3, chaps. 1, 25, 31, 49.

40. The Complete Essays ofMontaigne, trans. by Donald M. Frame (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1965), p. xiii.

41. The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931). On capability, 1: 81-82, 88, 98, 106-8, 121, 171-79, 197; on accumulation, 1: 82, 91, 121, 125-26.

42. Elements, p. 70; De Cive, p. 109 (EW, 2: 1). 43. Elements, p. 29; De Cive, p. 150 (EW, 2: 47); Leviathan, "Introduction," p. 20 (EW, 3:

xi); chap. 4, p. 40 (EW, 3: 28); chap. 6, p. 48 (EW, 3: 40-41); chap. 8, p. 62 (EW, 3: 61); chap. 15, p. 123 (EW, 3: 140).




human conduct, he recognizes that there are exceptions." Moreover, he holds that human desires are insatiable, and that our actions are regularly taken with a view to self-interest.45 Presumably, this is what he is referring to when he says that he has based his philosophy on "the known, natural inclinations of mankind."46 And certainly he has introduced, in this way, substantively important claims. Yet he has not thereby sacrificed the generality of his psychology, since neither the notion of unlimited desire nor that of self-interestedness has any particular content. In principle, at least, the whole realm of actions remains entirely open, completely unspecified. Indeed, at this level of analysis, Hobbes holds that humankind cannot be diffentiated from the rest of the animals.47 This is why he is always at pains to rebuke Aristotle for, as Hobbes sees it, blurring the vital distinction between the political and the non- or prepolitical.48

Thus far we have only a world of unlimited and endlessly various strivings. This is quite enough to produce catastrophe. Substantively, Hobbes's point is that human nature manifests itself in unlimited desire (as Aristotle would agree), and that the objects of our desire are hopelessly diverse.49 Indeed, our several strivings are utterly idiosyncratic: scarcely any two people call the same thing good.50 Hobbes thus begins with a dramatic intensification of the essential problem. But this depressing claim suits his purpose perfectly, which is to induce the realization that our situation, as it stands, can only mean permanent competition; it is an affair of actual or incipient chaos. It is just this that has somehow to be overcome, of course, but he begins, in

44. Elements, pp. 39, 86; De Cive, pp. 90, 99, 115, 142 (EW, 2: ii, xv, 8, 38); Leviathan, chap. 15, p. 119 (E W, 3: 140).

45. On insatiability see Elements, pp. 30, 47-48; Leviathan, chap. 6, p. 55 (EW, 3: 51); chap. 8, p. 62 (EW, 3: 61-62); chap. 11, p. 80 (EW, 3: 85-86); De Homine, p. 54 (LW, 2: 103). Initial page references to this last work will be to the translation of Charles T. Wood, T. S. K. Scott-Craig, and Bernard Gert as printed in Gert, Man and Citizen, followed by citation of the Molesworth edition. On self-interest see Leviathan, chap. 14, p. 105 (EW, 3: 120); chap. 15, pp. 114, 118, 121-22 (EW, 3: 133, 138, 143); chap. 18, p. 141 (EW, 3: 170); chap. 19, p. 145 (EW, 3: 176-77).

46. Leviathan, "Review," p. 509 (EW, 3: 710). 47. Elements, pp. 18-19, 45; Leviathan, chap. 2, p. 27 (EW, 3: 11); chap. 3, p. 31 (EW, 3:

16); chap. 4, p. 33 (EW, 3: 18). 48. Elements, pp. 102-3; De Cive, pp. 167-69 (EW, 2: 66-68); Leviathan, chap. 17, pp.

131-32 (EW, 3: 156-57). Hobbes could not resist the temptation to rebuke Aristotle, for elsewhere he makes it clear that he understood that Aristotle was not confused on the point: "When Aristotle calls them [bees] political or social creatures, he did not intend it really that they lived a civil life, but according to an analogy, because they do such things by instinct as truly political creatures do out of judgment" (EW, 5: 89). Presumably, the passage Hobbes has in mind is Politics, I, 1253a 7-18.

49. Aristotle, Politics, II, 1267a. For Hobbes on diversity see Elements, pp. 23, 29; De Cive, pp. 92, 122, 141, 150-51, 178, 282-83, 351 (EW, 2: v, 15, 36, 47-48, 77, 196, 277); Leviathan, chap. 4, p. 40 (EW, 3: 28); chap. 6, pp. 48, 50, 53 (EW, 3: 40-41, 43, 47-48); chap. 11, p. 80 (EW, 3: 85); chap. 15, pp. 118, 123 (EW, 3: 139, 146); chap. 26, p. 214 (EW, 3: 274-75); De Homine, pp. 47, 68 (LW, 2: 96, 116).

50. De Cive, pp. 282-83 (EW, 2: 196); Leviathan, chap. 6, pp. 48-49 (EW, 3: 40-41); chap. 15, p. 123 (EW, 3: 146); chap. 26, p. 214 (EW, 3: 274-75).




effect, by making diversity virtually infinite. As things are, we cannot get what we want-the satisfaction of our desires-either in fact or in principle. But these desires have no necessary or particular content. Rightly understood and arranged, the infinity of human striving can be turned not only to good purpose but to a solution to the problem of perpetual war.

The key to the solution lies in an accurate understanding of just what it is that comprises the difference between human beings and the other animals, and how that difference works. And it is here that one finds the confluence of several distinct streams of classical thought. To begin with, Hobbes insists, with Aristotle, that it is our ability to speak that makes all the difference.5' Given his quarrels with Aristotle on the issue of what is and what is not properly called political, Hobbes seems to take the view that Aristotle failed to recognize the implications of his own point. At all events, Hobbes holds that it is the fact that we are language animals that accounts for all our non- natural woes and, at the same time, all of our possibilities.52 But this general point is supplemented by the introduction of a radical conventionalism quite unlike anything heard since the "sophistic movement" of 5th-century Athens. More particularly, Hobbes has here embraced the views of "the first and greatest of the Sophists," Protagoras.s3 Despite his very considerable ad- miration for Plato, Hobbes has thus revived the central plank in the theoretical platform of Plato's principal intellectual antagonists.54 No doubt Hobbes's conventionalism is not so radical as that of, say, Wittgenstein, for Hobbes did not question the objective reliability of our sense experience, or the possibility of valid reference to that experience by our words, or the status of logic.55 But it is perfectly adequate to his needs. For he believes he can claim that all standards whatsoever derive from human institutions: from

51. Politics, I, 1253a 10-12; Leviathan, chap. 3, p. 31 (EW, 3: 16); chap. 4, pp. 33, 36 (EW, 3: 18, 22-23).

52. Elements, pp. 19, 22, 64-65, 68; De Cive, pp. 344-45, 367-68, 374 (EW, 2: 268-69, 295-96, 304); Leviathan, chap. 4, pp. 34, 36-37 (EW, 3: 20, 23-24); chap. 5, pp. 43-44 (EW, 3: 32-35); De Homine, pp. 39-41 (LW, 2: 90-92); EW, 1: 36; EW, 7: 78.

53. G. B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); the quotation is from W. K. C. Guthrie, The Sophists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 63. Leviathan, chap. 2, p. 23 (EW, 3: 4) echoes the single most celebrated doctrine of Protagoras: "Man is the measure of all things, of the things that are that they are, and of the things that are not that they are not." See Plato, Cratylus, 386a; Theaetetus, 152a; Aristotle, Metaphysics, XI, 6, 1062b.

54. On Plato see De Cive, p. 374 (EW, 2: 304); Leviathan, chap. 31, p. 270 (EW, 3: 357); chap. 46, p. 481 (EW, 3: 668); EW, 7: 346.

55. See David Pears, Ludwig Wittgenstein (New York: Viking, 1970), esp. pp. 179-98, for a discussion of what Pears calls Wittgenstein's anthropocentrism. Wittgenstein seems to have been prepared to draw logic itself into question. See, for example, Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), 1, ss. 81, 89, 90-101, 107-111, 115-116, 118-119, 122-133, 158, 198-199,201-202,217,219,241-243,327,330, 337, 339, 341, 355, 373, 377. Some of the questions raised are discussed in George Pitcher, ed., Wittgenstein: The Philosophical Investigations (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1966), pp. 420-96.




arbitrary linguistic impositions, agreements, and customs.56 This step in the development of his theory is not only indispensable but profoundly ingenious. It is precisely the conventional nature of our standards and institutions that makes it possible for us to know them with certainty and that makes, therefore, a general civil science possible."7 Moreover, this makes them teachable and so brings them within our power to control, if we will do so."8 Furthermore, Hobbes can now argue that all the specific content of our desires and, indeed, even of reason itself is acquired rather than natural, conventional rather than innate.59 Because we speak, we are the only animals capable of reason, able, in principle, to see right through to the essential logic of our situation. Hence, nothing bars us-again, in principle-from living "securely, happily, and elegantly; we can so live, I insist, if we so will."60 But at the same time, our ability to speak also means that we are the sole species who can not only practice deceit-"the only creature ever made who fakes," as Auden bluntly put it-but who can deceive themselves.6' Thus, the fact that the "tongue of man is a trumpet of war and sedition" is both tragically true and completely avoidable.62 Hobbes himself provides a summary of much of the foregoing argument:

All the calamities which human industry can avoid arise from war, especially from civil war.... But the cause of these things is not that hu- mans want them; for there is no will except for the good, at least for what appears so; and it is not that they do not know that these things are evils.... Therefore, the cause of civil war is that people are igno- rant of the cause of wars and peace and that there are very few who

56. Elements, pp. 16-18; De Cive, pp. 345, 367-68, 373-74 (EW, 2: 269, 295-96, 302-4); Leviathan, chap. 3, p. 31 (EW, 3: 16); chap. 4, p. 35 (EW, 3: 21-22); chap. 5, p. 41 (EW, 3: 30); chap. 31, p. 269 (EW, 3: 355); chap. 32, p. 271 (EW, 3: 359); chap. 34, p. 286 (EW, 3: 380); chap. 46, p. 484 (EW, 3: 673); De Homine, pp. 37-39 (LW, 2: 88-90); EW, 1: 14, 16, 36-37, 55-56, 388, 531; EW, 7: 183-84.

57. Elements, pp. 24-26; De Cive, pp. 367-68, 373-75 (EW, 2: 295-97, 303-5); Leviathan, chap. 4, pp. 35-40 (EW, 3: 21-29); chap. 5, pp. 45-46 (EW, 3: 35-38); chap. 8, p. 62 (EW, 3: 61); chap. 15, pp. 122-24 (EW, 3: 144-47); chap. 20, pp. 157-58 (EW, 3: 195); chap. 25, p. 195 (EW, 3: 246-47); chap. 30, pp. 247-49 (EW, 3: 322-25); chap. 46, pp. 478-79 (EW, 3: 664-65); De Homine, pp. 41-43 (LW, 2: 92-94).

58. Elements, pp. 51, 92, 183-84; De Cive, pp. 262-63 (E W, 2: 171-72); Leviathan, chap. 3, p. 31 (EW, 3: 16); chap. 4, pp. 33, 37 (EW, 3: 18, 24-25); chap. 15, pp. 122-24 (EW, 3: 144-47); chap. 18, pp. 137-38 (EW, 3: 164-65); chap. 19, pp. 143, 145-46 (EW, 3: 173, 176-77); chap. 30, p. 249 (EW, 3: 325-26); chap. 31, p. 270 (EW, 3: 357-58); chap. 43, pp. 427-28 (EW, 3: 589-90); "Review," pp. 503, 510-511 (EW, 3: 702, 712-14); Behemoth, pp. 39-40, 62, 64, 160.

59. Leviathan, chap. 3, p. 31 (EW, 3: 16). 60. Elements, p. 94; De Cive, p. 229 (EW, 2: 135); Leviathan, chap. 17, p. 129 (EW, 3:

153). The quotation is from De Homine, p. 40 (LW, 2: 91). 61. Elements, p. 22; De Cive, pp. 168-69 (EW, 2: 67); Leviathan, chap. 4, p. 34 (EW, 3:

20); chap. 5, p. 43 (EW, 3: 32-33); chap. 6, p. 55 (EW, 3: 50); chap. 7, p. 57 (EW, 3: 53); chap. 8, pp. 67-68 (EW, 3: 69-70); chap. 11, p. 83 (EW, 3: 90); De Homine, pp. 40-41 (LW, 2: 91-92); E W, 1: 36. W. H. Auden, "'The Truest Poetry is the most Feigning,'" in Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-1957 (New York: Vintage, 1975), p. 317.

62. De Cive, pp. 168-69 (EW, 2: 67).




have learned their responsibilities, by which peace flourishes and is pre- served, that is, the true rule of living. But moral philosophy is knowledge of this rule.63

And, of course, Hobbes's moral science provides the requisite knowledge. Hobbes is fully aware of the novelty of the theory he has developed, and

of the stunningly paradoxical character of the view that the manifold tragedies of human history have been largely needless. But if this is the case, it is plainly necessary that he give us an account of how it can be so, both because the evidence is so overwhelmingly adverse and because, as he wishes to claim, accurate diagnosis has gone undiscovered across centuries of experience and thought. He is prepared with a twofold response to this challenge. He argues that experience proves nothing against him, both because experience is always inconclusive as argument and because all improvements are a function of "time and industry."64 Second, all moral philosophy, till the appearance of his own work, has been doubly and systematically wrong: "wholly estranged," he says, "from the moral law," and the general proof is continuous contention and war.65 Indeed, Hobbes explicitly maintains that moral philosophers are ultimately responsible for the condition of perpetual war. 66 But, more specifically, moral philosophy has misled us, both because it lacked the correct method and because it was assumed that such knowledge is something we possess or acquire naturally, merely by what he derisively calls "mother wit."67 But this is a complete mistake; all such ideas derive from human agreements or customs, not from the philosopher's native gifts. This does not, however, mean that all one need do is record or generalize about customary linguistic meanings. On the contrary, that is one of the general criticisms Hobbes brings against the ancient philosophers: they merely transcribed the practices of their own social orders.68 Apart from its fatal lack of universality, this fails to deal with the ambiguities and equivocations that collect around our usages. Such work is not simply fruitless, it is deeply dangerous, since it feeds the disagreement that leads to contention and war.69 Hence, the philosopher's task is something like the opposite of complacent acceptance of whatever happens to pass for current political or moral usage. Such usages, Hobbes insists, can never supply the foundation of any true

63. This translation from Part I of De Corpore is taken from Thomas Hobbes, Computatio Sive Logica/Logic, trans. by Aloysius Martinich, ed. by Isabel C. Hungerland and George R. Vick (New York: Abaris Books, 1981), p. 185. Cf. EW, 1: 8.

64. On inconclusive experience see Elements, p. 16; Leviathan, chap. 20, p. 158 (EW, 3: 195); EW, 7: 398. On improvements see Leviathan, chap. 30, p. 248 (EW, 3: 324).

65. De Cive, p. 151 (E W, 2: 49). 66. Ibid., p. 98 (EW, 2: xiii); see also p. 344 (EW, 2: 268); EW, 1: x; EW, 7: 76 expresses

a more moderate view: moral philosophy "has been a great hindrance to the peace of the western world...."

67. On method see Elements, p. 1; De Cive, p. 92 (EW, 2: v-vi); Leviathan, chap. 5, pp. 43-44 (EW, 3: 33); EW, 1: 8. The phrase is from De Cive, p. 96 (EW, 2: x)

68. Leviathan, chap. 21, p. 163 (EW, 3: 202). 69. Leviathan, chap. 5, pp. 45-46 (EW, 3: 36-37); chap. 26, p. 209 (EW, 3: 267-68).




ratiocination.70 At the same time, however, he does maintain the general principle that truth or falsity depends upon common usage. But he assumes both that linguistic uses, originally at least, were means of referring to the mental images produced in sense experience and that they were univocal, constant in their reference.7' The task of the moral philosopher is to recover those original meanings and thereby establish their empirical reference and purge them of their ambiguity. The failure to perform both these operations accounts for the universal failure of moral or civil philosophy and defines the wholly "acquired wit" that Hobbes holds is science; that is, the work of reason.72

In sum, his claim is that all pre-Hobbesian civil or moral philosophy has involved the inculcation of error, and the result is uncertainty, contention, and war. However, since all human action proceeds from the will, and what is willed is a function of acquired beliefs-of what he calls "opinion"-the affairs of the world are invariably governed by opinion.73 The general form of the problem, for Hobbes, is that virtually any opinion is susceptible to being put at the service of political mischief, to being employed in the pursuit of ambition and avarice.74 What Hobbes does initially, in other words, is quite literally politicize everything. All opinion has political implications, and all actions are a function of opinion. As a result, Hobbes's prescription involves nothing less than the reciprocal of this diagnosis: the abolition of politics. In effect, he redefines politics exclusively in terms of the actions of the sovereign, and these are the concern of no one else. At this level, Hobbes presents his reader with a radicalized version of the ethics of Epicurus: each of us is to be trained to confine his desires to the satisfactions of private life. "For there is no reason," he says, "why every man should not naturally mind his own private, than the public business."75 Thus, the intractable diversity he has insisted upon survives, but only through its having been completely relocated in nonpolitical pursuits. His scheme represents the apotheosis of diversity but, at the same time, its complete political erasure. More specifically, however, the root of the difficulty is that all the opinions we have inherited lead us either to hopes that cannot be fulfilled or to fears so excessive that they are incompatible with enduring order and peace.76 It

70. Ibid., chap. 4, p. 40 (EW, 3: 29). 71. Elements, pp. 20-21, 31; De Cive, pp. 373-74 (EW, 2: 303-4); Leviathan, chap. 2, p.

24 (EW, 3: 6); chap. 3, p. 28 (EW, 3: 11-12); chap. 4, pp. 36-37, 39 (EW, 3: 23-25, 27-28); chap. 5, p. 42 (EW, 3: 30-32); chap. 46, p. 482 (EW, 3: 671); EW, 1: 36, 37, 70, 84.

72. Elements, pp. 16-17, 20-21; De Cive, pp. 344, 367-68, 373-74 (EW, 2: 268-69, 295-96, 303-4); EW, 4: 335.

73. Elements, p. 63; De Cive, pp. 163, 165, 179, 365 (EW, 2: 62, 63, 78, 293); Leviathan, chap. 18, pp. 137, 140 (EW, 3: 164, 168); chap. 21, p. 163 (EW, 3: 202-3); chap. 32, p. 272 (EW, 3: 360); chap. 38, pp. 329-30 (EW, 3: 444); chap. 42, p. 393 (EW, 3: 537); EW, 4: 268, 272-75.

74. De Cive, p. 179 fn. (EW, 2: 78-79 fn). 75. Ibid., p. 232 (EW, 2: 140). 76. Elements, pp. 39-40, 51-53, 169, 175-78; De Cive, pp. 165, 179, 252-54 (EW, 2: 63,

78, 160-63); Leviathan, chap. 6, pp. 50, 53 (EW, 3: 43, 47-48); chap. 8, p. 63 (EW, 3: 62-63); chap. 13, pp. 98-99 (EW, 3: 111); De Homine, pp. 57-58 (LW, 2: 106); see also EW, 4: 242-45.




is exactly these misplaced hopes and fears-misplaced because they rest on ignorance or falsehood-that supply the motive power of political catastrophe. Virtually all opinion is manifestly false because truth, he holds, can never be inconsistent with peace.77 Hence, the task becomes one of sweeping away all inherited beliefs whatsoever and, of course, replacing them with Hobbes's civil science.

Formally, then, Hobbes's program rests on the sovereign's exclusive title to political activity and the complete privatization of the pursuits of all nonsovereign persons. Substantively, it rests upon a complete reformation of education. It is not too much to say that Hobbes shared Aristotle's conviction that it is education that matters above all. Only the new content and aims of Hobbes's educative state can provide the foundation for a new kind of political entity.78 It is the combination of a "uniformitarian" but completely abstract psychology with his Protagorean conventionalism that supplies the framework.79 What stands in the way of peace is not the nastiness of human nature but the joint existence of false belief and the natural condition of competitive individualism mistakenly but fatally channeled into public life. But he insists that his educational renovation can rectify this catastrophic misdirection of our hopes and fears. Indeed, Hobbes managed to persuade himself that the overhaul of the content of our beliefs through altered educational aims would really not be at all difficult.80 He clearly takes an immensely optimistic, even exalted, view of the possibilities open to us, though certainly not of what we have thus far managed to do.8' For not only does he think us capable of reason but, what is very different and far more, he holds that we can be expected to abide by it. Thus, "if the minds of men were all of white paper, they would almost equally be disposed to acknowledge whatsoever should be in right method,-and right ratiocination delivered unto them."82 But, in fact, our minds are white paper, provided that one begins at a relatively young age. Hobbes supposed that the time of university education was, in general, soon enough. (And normally this was, to be sure, substantially earlier in life than it is today.) The same sort of view is expressed, even more forcefully, in Leviathan: "The common people's minds, unless they be tainted with dependence on the potent, or scribbled over with the opinions of their doctors, are like clean paper, fit to receive whatsoever by

77. Leviathan, chap. 18, p. 137 (EW, 3: 164). 78. Politics, II, 1263b; V, 13 1Oa. On Hobbes's educative state see Elements, pp. 51, 183-84;

De Cive, pp. 262-63 (EW, 2: 171-72); Leviathan, chap. 18, pp. 137, 139-40 (EW, 3: 164-65, 167-68); chap. 30, pp. 247-53 (EW, 3: 322-31); "Review," p. 503 (EW, 3: 702); Behemoth, pp. 39-40, 70-71, 160; EW, 4: 438.

79. The word is borrowed from Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 35.

80. Elements, pp; 183-84; De Cive, pp. 148, 262-63 (EW, 2: 44-45, 171-72); Leviathan, chap. 15, p. 122 (EW, 3: 144-45); chap. 30, p. 249 (EW, 3: 325-26); Behemoth, pp. 39-40; De Homine, p. 52 (LW, 2: 102); EW, 4: 439.

81. Leviathan, chap. 29, pp. 237-38 (EW, 3: 308-9); chap. 30, pp. 247-49 (EW, 3: 322-35). 82. Elements, p. 51.




public authority shall be imprinted in them."83 In principle, then, the mind can be supplied with the appropriate content.

In the meantime, however, it is necessary first to launch Leviathan and then to embark upon the campaign to re-educate, to "root out" the poison of false doctrines, but by educational, not coercive, means.84 The initiation of the new state requires reliance chiefly on the motive of fear.85 But it is a mistake to suppose that Hobbes meant his solution to represent no more than this. He is careful to explain that war is likely to resume so soon as men have forgotten the horror of the last one unless education has been reformed and, particularly, unless the common people should be better in- structed than before.86 Leviathan, therefore, is to rest on true and correctly cultivated belief rather than on fear, force, or fraud. Albert Hirschman seems to me exactly right to point out that what he has called the "countervailing passions" -in Hobbes's case fear, the desire for commodious living, and the hope of obtaining it-need to operate only once.87 If the ruler can be brought to recognize the requirements of enduring sovereignty, then the ultimate causes of war can be removed.

3. Institutional and educational reformation

It is now possible to turn to the question of the relationship of Leviathan and the dual problem of internal and external violence. Hobbes summarizes the forms of contention as deriving from mistrust, competition for gain, and the pursuit of glory. The structure and the educational program of Leviathan are expressly designed to supply remedies for all these sources of contention. In general, of course, Hobbes maintains that absolute sovereignty removes the need to resort to violence based upon just suspicion and mutual fear among citizens. In addition, however, he engages in a studied effort to extirpate any political manifestation of ambition and avarice, to solve the perennial problem of the overmighty subject. It is just here that Hobbes makes his much noticed assault on the pretensions and the exalted social and political status of the aristocracy. There are three main lines of attack. First, Hobbes dismisses, as no more than superstition, the traditional notion that either the ability or the right to positions of leadership or counsel in the state attach to persons as a matter of birth.88 Second, he argues that correct governance,

83. Ibid., pp. 183-84; De Cive, p. 263 (EW, 2: 172); Leviathan, "Review," pp. 510-11 (EW, 3: 713); Behemoth, p. 71. The quotation is from Leviathan, chap. 30, P. 249 (EW, 3: 325).

84. De Cive, pp. 262-63 (EW, 2: 171-72); see also Elements, pp. 183-84. 85. Leviathan, chap. 13, p. 102 (EW, 3: 116); chap. 14, pp. 105, 108, 111 (EW, 3: 119, 124,

128-29); chap. 20, p. 151 (EW, 3: 185); chap. 27, p. 221 (EW, 3: 285). 86. Elements, "Epistle Dedicatory"; Leviathan, chap. 18, pp. 139-40 (EW, 3: 167-68); chap.

30, p. 249 (EW, 3: 325-26); chap. 47, pp. 497-98 (EW, 3: 693-95). 87. Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1978), p. 31. 88. Elements, pp. 87-88; Leviathan, chap. 30, p. 258 (E W, 3: 340); Behemoth, p. 31.




in any case, depends upon the purely acquired knowledge of civil science and so has no relation to mere natural wit, especially if that happens to have been developed on the basis of a classical education, which, of course, it would have done.89 And third, under the new arrangements, the sovereign's position is so exalted that everyone will appear equal by comparison and, for good measure, will be taught the correctness of this estimation.90 But he is no less emphatic that wealth bolsters no more than equally irrelevant claims to political roles in the commonwealth. The rich are no better qualified than anyone else (which really means everyone else), since they, too, lack familiarity with the principles of civil science. Moreover, they are inclined to be chronically myopic, since their experience is exhausted by attentiveness only to their own present profit.9' Furthermore, no one-aristocrat or pluto- crat-is any longer to be permitted ostentatious display, or to be accorded any impunity from the consequences of misdeeds.92

The implications of all this with regard to interstate war are not what one could call crystal clear. Indeed, what Hobbes does say might be thought to point in more than one direction. True, he invariably summarizes the sovereign's duty in terms of providing for internal peace and external defense. Moreover, the latter is incontestably a matter of vigilance, foresight, and adequate preparation.93 Furthermore, Hobbes consistently maintains a distinction between the possibility of attaining a permanent peace when its internal requirements are considered in isolation and the fact that it may nevertheless suffer disruption in the form of external aggression.94 So it must be conceded that one could quite reasonably argue that Hobbes confines his hope for peace to the domestic sphere, that he resigns himself to the armed camps of the state of nature in international politics. Yet these points do not exhaust what Hobbes has to say in connection with interstate war. As already suggested, there are some indications that his aim may have involved rather more than the suggestive statements cited at the beginning of this discussion.

At one level, these indications have to do with the attributes, functions,

89. Elements, p. 66; De Cive, pp. 96, 252 (EW, 2: x-xi, 160); Leviathan, chap. 5, p. 46 (EW, 3: 37-38); chap. 8, pp. 61-62 (EW, 3: 60-62); chap. 15, pp. 123-24 (EW, 3: 146-47); chap. 20, p. 158 (EW, 3: 195-96); chap. 21, pp. 162-63 (EW, 3: 201-3); chap. 25, pp. 192, 195 (EW, 3: 242-43, 246-47); chap. 27, p. 219 (EW, 3: 282); chap. 30, p. 258 (EW, 3: 340); De Homine, p. 68 (LW, 2: 115-16); Behemoth, pp. 3, 23, 43, 70, 155, 158-60; EW, 7: 399.

90. Leviathan, chap. 18, p. 141 (EW, 3: 169); chap. 30, pp. 250, 254 (EW, 3: 327, 333). 91. Ibid., chap. 19, p. 144 (EW, 3: 174); chap. 30, p. 258 (EW, 3: 340); Behemoth, p. 142. 92. DeCive, p. 267 (EW, 2:178); Leviathan, chap. 27, pp. 221,224-26 (EW, 3: 285,290-91);

chap. 30, pp. 253-54 (EW, 3: 332-33); see also chap. 15, pp. 118-19 (EW, 3: 139). 93. On the sovereign's duty see De Cive, pp. 169, 177, 223 (EW, 2: 68, 76, 128); Leviathan,

chap. 17, p. 132 (EW, 3: 158); chap. 18, pp. 134, 137 (EW, 3: 159, 163-64); chap. 19, p. 143 (EW, 3: 173); chap. 25, p. 195 (EW, 3: 246); chap. 26, p. 200 (EW, 3: 254). On defense see Elements, p. 184; De Cive, pp. 260-62 (EW, 2: 169-71); Leviathan, chap. 18, pp. 138-39 (EW, 3: 166); chap. 29, p. 244 (EW, 3: 319).

94. Elements, pp. 111, 168; De Cive, p. 177 (EW, 2: 76); Leviathan, chap. 20, pp. 157-58 (EW, 3: 195); chap. 21, p. 167 (EW, 3: 208); chap. 29, p. 237 (EW, 3: 308).




and objectives of the true sovereign. On another but clearly related plane, they involve Hobbes's effort to transcend the inherited, Greco-Roman conception of the polity. With respect to the first of these, his aims emerge in the effort to supply content for the traditional maxim he employs so often, that the good of the people is the supreme law (salus populi suprema lex). In addition to the measures already mentioned that are designed to make Leviathan "king of the proud," to squelch the overweening political ambitions of great men, which so often result in imperial designs or in conspiring with foreign powers, it is also the sovereign's duty to see to it that material abundance at home is sufficient to remove the economic impulse to domestic ambition and to imperialist ventures.95 More generally, Hobbes's elaborate analysis of the indispensable elements of sovereignty may be reduced, as he points out, to complete charge over three matters: militia, money, and mind.96 It is control over education that is crucial. Thus, having delineated the elements of sovereignty, Hobbes says "therefore" the sovereign must have complete control over what is said and taught.97 It is plain enough, too, what must not be taught and why not: both the classics and all forms of theology must be abandoned. One great vice of the classics is that they exalt the martial virtues and martial glory.98 And, because they are inspired by a theology that is essentially Roman Catholic in character, the universities of England, Hobbes maintains, "have been to this nation, as the wooden horse was to the Trojans." In other words, they have been instruments of the foreign policy of the papacy.99

Again, Hobbes suggests that the true sovereign would recognize the im- prudence of an adventurous foreign policy.'00 On this issue, he frequently refers to the unwarranted hazard of war or to what he calls the "uncertain die" of war.'0' On other occasions, he supplies a quite different reason for avoiding the attempt to ensure external security in the Roman or Athenian manner-by a more or less deliberate and ruthless imperialism-by arguing that this sort of expansionism would be self-defeating because it would make real "union" or "sodality" in the commonwealth impossible.'02

95. The phrase is from Leviathan, chap. 28, p. 236 (EW, 3: 307). See also Elements, pp. 180-8 1; De Cive, pp. 266-67 (EW, 2: 176); Leviathan, chap. 24, pp. 185-86 (EW, 3: 232-33).

96. Leviathan, chap. 18, pp. 139-40 (EW, 3: 167-68). 97. Ibid., chap. 18, p. 137 (EW, 3: 164); see also Elements, pp. 183-84; De Cive, p. 263

(EW, 2: 172). 98. Leviathan, chap. 21, pp. 162-63 (EW, 3: 201-3); chap. 29, pp. 241-42 (EW, 3: 314-15);

Behemoth, pp. 3? 23, 43. 99. The quotation is from Behemoth, p. 40. See also ibid., pp. 14, 16-18, 20, 40-41, 148;

see also Leviathan, chap. 29, pp. 237-38 (EW, 3: 309); chap. 30, pp. 252-53 (EW, 3: 331-32); chap. 46, p. 482 (EW, 3: 670); chap. 47, pp. 497-98 (EW, 3: 693-95); "Review," pp. 510-11 (EW, 3: 713); EW, 7: 399-400.

100. Elements, p. 184; De Cive, p. 267 (EW, 2: 177); Leviathan, chap. 24, p. 187 (EW, 3: 235-36); chap. 29, p. 245 (EW, 3: 321).

101. Leviathan, chap. 20, p. 155 (EW, 3: 191), and chap. 24, p. 187 (EW, 3: 236); De Cive, pp. 217, 267 (EW, 2: 121, 177).

102. De Cive, p. 267 (EW, 2: 177); Leviathan, chap. 29, p. 245 (EW, 3: 321).




In quite another way, moreover, Hobbes adds other relevant points in his effort to avoid the flaws he finds in the Greco-Roman idea of the city. These considerations, insufficiently appreciated, are surely pertinent and clearly important in Hobbes's view. One aspect is the point just made: avoiding the error of imperial expansion, which, he says, not only frustrates the sort of political union he has in mind but also is more likely to produce "incurable wounds" than it is to provide abundance.'03 Another is his recognition of the fact that the city-whether classical or Machiavellian-is simply not a viable political entity. He addresses this part of the classical legacy in several important and interesting ways. First, and most obviously, he makes the point that the city is too small; as for little commonwealths, he remarks, no human wisdom can preserve them. 104 Second, he plainly rejects the peculiarly Greek dream of the self-sufficient polis in emphasizing what was to become the central idea in the postmercantilist conception of international trade: what is not available in sufficient amounts at home can be obtained by trading what one has in "superfluous" amounts. Indeed, he attributes the Peloponnesian war to the Athenian failure to allow for free trade, as it were. 105

Third, and probably most significant to Hobbes himself, he would have us abandon classical literature altogether, since it struck him as altogether too much preoccupied with soldierly exploits. 106 Finally, and most deeply, Hobbes does not merely abandon the idea that political vigor and stability derive from the identification of people and polity-the sum of all the peculiarly Greek and Roman associations of politeia and civitas-but inverts the relationship. The citizens of Hobbes's polity are to be completely immersed in private pursuits and so not just politically passive but inert.

In sum, Hobbes's effort to show us the highway to peace proceeds along two avenues. They might be expressed as his attempt to remove the causes, motives, and temptations to external as well as civil war by working, as it were, from inside out and outside in. That is, he aims to remove any plausible temptation to foreign powers both through demonstrated competence and preparation at home and through the state's exhibition of the kind of solidarity he calls "union." At the same time, an institutional and educational reformation is designed to eliminate the sorts of ambitions in domestic politics that he thinks lead to adventurism and imperialism. Certainly he does not go so far as to suggest, with Plato, that a rightly ordered polity will surely be free of both internal and external violence. But neither does he share Thucydides' resignation to the state of war. Here, he adopts a kind of Aris- totelian via media: the correct internal measures should ensure that a foreign

103. Leviathan, chap. 29, p. 245 (EW, 3: 321). 104. Ibid., chap. 25, p. 197 (EW, 3: 250). 105. Elements, pp. 180-81; De Cive, pp. 266-67 (EW, 2: 176-77); Leviathan, chap. 24, p.

185 (EW, 3: 232-33). On Athens' failure see Elements, p. 87. 106. Leviathan, chap. 29, pp. 241-42 (EW, 3: 314-15).




power would be most unlikely to accept the risks of an attack on such a polity, nor would such a polity be inclined to external ventures of its own. '07

However, even if the line of interpretation suggested here were granted, it would remain the case (unsurprisingly) that Hobbes's treatment of war is a compound of the old and the new, recognizably modern but also distinctly premodern. It may well be possible to argue that, on his own terms, Hobbes did address the problem of interstate war. The entire treatment, after all, derives from an era in which interstate war appeared, on the one hand, as the expression of dynastic or more broadly of familial ambitions and, on the other, as religiously inspired warfare that involved a systematic blurring of domestic and external interests, commitments, and forces. Hobbes con- fronted both faces of interstate war. For it is his view that "there are no wars so sharply waged as between sects of the same religion, and factions of the same commonweal... ." Moreover, he holds that the "most frequent pretext of sedition, and civil war, in Christian commonwealths" is the notion that legitimate questions may arise as between the citizen's duty to obey the commands of God and the commands of the civil sovereign. 108 But, of course, roughly half of Leviathan, and substantial portions of his other political works, are devoted to the argument that this supposed dilemma is not only completely unreal, it is also sufficiently pernicious for him to insist that theology can and should be completely abandoned. This can be done without involving the loss of individual salvation, however, since salvation depends wholly on the single belief that Jesus is the Christ.'09 In this connection, moreover, Hobbes regularly has interstate relations in mind, both because of interference from abroad and because of sympathizers within the commonwealth."0 Thus, Hobbes not only provides a partial outline of a new conception of the polity-the sovereign, territorial, and Erastian (though not yet secular) state-but quite clearly makes the state a positive element of hope in the search for peace, rather than the primary source of trouble that it has since come to seem for so many observers. And again, it might be suggested that he is among the early theorists of a kind of national con- sciousness based upon a shared language. For in his concentration on the purely conventional foundations of all our standards, he insists that access to truth itself is based on "the common consent of them who are of the same language with us (as it were, by a certain contract necessary for human society)... ."" ' On the other hand, however, there is, in Hobbes, no antic- ipation of the nation in arms as the result of secular solidarity, no sense of

107. Politics, VII, 133 la, 1333b-1334a. Cf. Leviathan, chap. 17, pp. 129-30(EW, 3: 154-56); De Cive, pp. 166-71 (EW, 2: 63-70).

108. De Cive, pp. 114-15 (EW, 2: 7); Leviathan, chap. 43, p. 424 (EW, 3: 584). 109. Elements, p. 164; De Cive, pp. 371, 375-77, 381 (EW, 2: 300, 305-7, 312); Leviathan,

chap. 43, pp. 425, 428-32 (EW, 3: 585, 590-96); Behemoth, p. 63; EW, 4: 345. 110. Leviathan, chap. 12, p. 97 (EW, 3: 108-9); chap. 29, p. 238 (EW, 3: 309); Behemoth,

pp. 18, 40-41, 148; EW, 4: 432; EW, 7: 399-400. 111. De Cive, p. 373 (EW, 2: 303); see also Leviathan, chap. 19, p. 150 (EW, 3: 183-84).




the consequences of mobilized peoples. His determined individualism plays him false, for he treats the entire subject in terms of individual dispositions. His theory precludes recognition of persistent, perhaps even legitimate, but nonetheless dangerous, differences of interest and aim between "collectives." At a deeper level, however, it is the very turn to a psychological perspective bereft of "time, place, and circumstance" that is ultimately at issue here."2

4. Hobbes's unrealism

What Hobbes bequeathed to us is not very well characterized as political "realism," whether one understands that word to refer primarily to an un- flattering account of the fundamental traits of human nature or to the idea that only power, in the sense of the instruments of coercion, counts. Indeed, even if one understands by realism the view that Beitz has called "international skepticism"-the inapplicability of any normative standards in the state of war- the case of Hobbes may not be quite so clear as it has sometimes been held to be.' 'I Hobbes's account of human nature is an affair of nonspecific capacities, on the one hand, and a "situation," on the other. To be sure, the combination produces lamentable conduct and consequences. But given Hobbes's conception of the solution to the problem of perpetual war, he cannot afford to make the wickedness of conduct the result of indelible traits, since this would defeat his purpose. Nor does he do so. As for the concept of power in Hobbes's system, it is clear that he means by it any and all means to the satisfaction of the individual's desires, and that living just is the constant but infinitely varying pursuit of desires. All this is Hobbes's way of saying that a person is alive.' '4 But the important point is that all power whatsoever is a function of what people have come to believe or been trained to believe. "For the power of the mighty hath no foundation but in the opinion and belief of the people."'" That is why Leviathan must be primarily an educative state.

Admittedly, the third meaning attached to the idea of realism is amply supported by Hobbes's text, and the interrogative hypothesis I have explored here certainly does not resolve all the difficulties. But, to return to the point borrowed from Oakeshott, Hobbes's text is apt to present problems for any single line of interpretation. It is quite possible, after all, that he simply was not altogether consistent. Generally, of course, he holds that the laws of

1 2. This way of phrasing the point I have borrowed from Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, p. 35.

1 13. Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations. 114. Leviathan, chap. 6, p. 55 (EW, 3: 51); chap. 8, p. 62 (EW, 3: 61-62). The famous

language of chap. 11, p. 80 (EW, 3: 85-86), should, I think, be read in this light: "So that in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death."

115. Behemoth, p. 16.




nature enjoin both individuals and sovereigns to endeavor peace whenever it can be safely obtained. Precisely what this obligation amounts to, however, is far from clear, involving, as it does, the much debated question of Hobbes's theory of obligation. "16 To enter into that discussion would require a separate essay, at the least. But perhaps it is possible to consider some portions of the problem apart from that issue. Hobbes does say, for instance, that the law of war is the law of honor, which means that cruelty and pointless revenge are excluded, and that the taking of a life can never be justified except by fear. "'7 At all events, however, my aim in this essay has been to suggest that Hobbes was at considerable pains to introduce substantial alterations in the nature and purpose of the polity and of education, and the content of these changes suggests that he may have anticipated, or at least hoped, that they might come to have genuine and salutary effects in the international state of nature. At a minimum, he appears to have thought that the adoption of his scheme would eliminate all but defensive wars. And at a maximum, might it not be possible that he hoped for the proliferation of enlightened sovereigns and properly nonpolitical citizen bodies? In connection with this suggestion, it is perhaps pertinent to recall that, in Hobbes's view, example is the most effective teacher by far."8

In sum, Hobbes's treatment of his chief concern-peace-is not usefully summarized by any of the standard uses of the word "realism." On the contrary, he is among the founding fathers of a profoundly unrealistic mode of thought, unrealistic precisely because it is systematically apolitical; it is apolitical because it is purposefully transhistorical. This mode of thought has been exhibited not only in modern realism in international political theory but also in the liberal idealism that has so often been set in opposition to it, as well as in a good many other lines of thought. Hobbes's resort to radical privatization is sufficiently plain, and it is without doubt an important part of the story. Diversity of belief and interest is politics, but, for Hobbes, this politics is war, and that is why diversity must be confined to the sphere of private life.

But this is not the heart of the matter. Rather, Hobbes, above all, accomplished a decisive shift of analytic focus in systematic political reflection from history to psychology, from concern with the often all too ugly and painful actualities of human experience to the presumptive validity of complete generality in the hidden uniformity of the human psyche. The result of this remarkable alteration of focus has been a persistent tendency to

116. The principal issues at stake here are conveniently presented in Brown, Hobbes Studies, chaps. 2-4.

117. Elements, pp. 100-101; De Cive, p. 149 fn (EW, 2: 45-46 fn); cf. Leviathan, chap. 17, pp. 129-30 (EW, 3: 154).

118. Leviathan, chap. 27, pp. 226-27 (EW, 3: 292-93); chap. 30, p. 257 (EW, 3: 337-38); chap. 45, p. 472 (EW, 3:655); Behemoth, p. 54; De Homine, pp. 67-68, 81-82 (LW, 2: 115-16, 129); EW, 4: 256, 346. This point is already apparent in Hobbes's first published work, his translation of Thucydides; see EW, 8: xxii.




multiply approaches to the study of society, approaches that, however different otherwise, share the inclination to ignore or deliberately minimize the particularities of time, and place, and circumstance. To be sure, Hobbes by no means established this habit of mind single-handedly. In particular, it re- mained for Locke to provide a sustained account and defense of the human mind conceived of as white paper, and of alternative uses of sensationalism; Hume would supply the specific principles of an associationism in psychology that is only announced in Hobbes; and political economists would first sys- tematize and then mathematicize the placeless and timeless. Contrary to Hobbes's own view, this last embalming process was accomplished in terms not of geometry but of simultaneous equations. But it may fairly be said that with Descartes, Hobbes stands at the head of the tradition.

Hobbes's supposed realism, in short, is much more nearly a headlong flight from the realities of history and human experience. And is it not this transhistorical impulse that lies at the root of the apolitical approach to the political? That is, is this not the principal feature of the inclination to undertake political analysis without any substantial reference to specific circumstance, place, and time, deliberately to abstract from specificity in the name of transhistorical generality? Hobbes's achievement is as undeniably fascinating as it is great. But are we well advised to follow his lead?



thomas hobbess- highway to peace

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